Number Theory Meets Linguistics: Modelling Noun Pluralisation Across 1497 Languages Using 2-adic Metrics

Gregory Baker, Diego Molla


Abstract
A simple machine learning model of pluralisation as a linear regression problem minimising a p-adic metric substantially outperforms even the most robust of Euclidean-space regressors on languages in the Indo-European, Austronesian, Trans New-Guinea, Sino-Tibetan, Nilo-Saharan, Oto-Meanguean and Atlantic-Congo language families. There is insufficient evidence to support modelling distinct noun declensions as a p-adic neighbourhood even in Indo-European languages.
Anthology ID:
2022.aacl-short.4
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
November
Year:
2022
Address:
Online only
Editors:
Yulan He, Heng Ji, Sujian Li, Yang Liu, Chua-Hui Chang
Venues:
AACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
24–32
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-short.4
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Gregory Baker and Diego Molla. 2022. Number Theory Meets Linguistics: Modelling Noun Pluralisation Across 1497 Languages Using 2-adic Metrics. In Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 24–32, Online only. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Number Theory Meets Linguistics: Modelling Noun Pluralisation Across 1497 Languages Using 2-adic Metrics (Baker & Molla, AACL-IJCNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl24-info/2022.aacl-short.4.pdf